Keith Tyson
title: untitled, AMCHII XVIII, 1994
size: approx. 20 x 12 cm.
format: framed print
status: proposed, fabricated & exhibited
description: on a certain date at a certain time, a photograph of the sky above london was taken with a 35mm camera. the result was then made into a jigsaw puzzle and a random piece was picked. from this piece, using the random caterpillar (pn =p(+/-x or +/-y) where n is a random number of iterations between 1 and 40 and x & y are coordinates from the original piece) a random section was selected and framed in an oak box frame.

"Since 1995, Tyson has been making works with his "Artmachine," a computer database with hypothetical materials, processes, and presentation methods which are combined by chance methods to produce descriptions of a proposed work of art."

Keith Tyson, the artist who put the Beano into quantum physics, and who once cast a Kentucky Fried Chicken menu in lead because his computerised "Art Machine" told him to, last night won the Turner prize.

The 33-year-old former Cumbrian shipyard worker, dubbed the "mad professor" for his fondness for exploring ideas from the outer limits of cod science and his outlandish proposals for giant neon dinosaurs and the like, had been the bookies' favourite.

As the artist with the best jokes, he was also the public's first choice, judging from comments left outside the Turner prize show at Tate Britain in London. That, however, did not stop the culture minister, Kim Howells, from making his notorious contribution to the comment board, describing Tyson's work and that of the other three Turner prize finallists as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.

"If this is the best British artists can produce," he elaborated, "then British art is lost." The minister, an art school graduate himself, did concede that Tyson could draw, even if it was "not something I'd cross the street to have a look at".

In Saturday's NYT, there is an article about Google's Live Query, which "shows updated samples of what people around the world are typing into Google's search engine. The terms scroll by in English, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, French, Dutch, Italian - any of the 86 languages that Google tracks."

While you have to visit Google's HQ to see Live Query, the publicly available version of this is called Google Zeitgeist, which "tracks search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google."

Also, as MikeMedia points out, "Buried on the second page of the article is this mention of the darker side of Google—it knows who you are:"

Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly - Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, face lifts. What is interesting in the aggregate can be seem an invasion of privacy if narrowed to an individual.